Introduction to LyX

Although (or perhaps because) it is one
of the most flexible typesetting tools, many people are a bit
afraid of using LaTeX. They'd rather use a standard word processor.
On the other hand, even for those of us quite accustomed to LaTeX,
some kind of WYSIWYG editor would often come in handy, especially
for shorter texts like letters.

Out on the Internet is a nice tool which may satisfy the
needs of both. It is called LyX and its home page is
http://la1ad.uio.no/lyx/. The primary download site is
ftp://ftp.via.ecp.fr/pub/lyx/, but you can also simply follow the
links from the home page. Initially it was written by Matthias
Ettrich (ettrich@kde.org), one of the initiators of the KDE
project, but it is now maintained by Lars Gullik Bjoennes
(larsbj@ifi.uio.no). The most recent package is usually called
lyx-current.tar.gz. For those of you running KDE, it may be
interesting to know that Matthias Ettrich has just released a KDE
version of LyX: KLyX
(http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/ettrich/klyx/klyx.html).
From the screenshots it looks very promising, so it may be the
version of choice if you have at least the basic KDE libraries
installed.

For the installation of the source package, you will also
need two libraries, which probably won't be included in your
system. One is the Xpm library; the other is XForms, a library for
simple XView GUI programming. You will need at least version 4.7 of
libXpm and 0.81 of libforms. Both of them can already be obtained
as Linux (ELF, a.out) binaries. You will find XForms at
ftp://laue.phys.uwm.edu/pub/XFORMS/,
ftp://ftp.via.ecp.fr/pub/xforms/ and
ftp://ftp.cs.ruu.nl/pub/xforms/ and Xpm at Sunsite and its mirrors
in libs/X/.

Installation

I will focus only on the installation of the binary
distribution. It is available for several flavours of UNIX (even
for OS/2) and is the easiest to install. Should you have any
problems with the binaries, you can still switch back to compiling
the sources (remembering to check for the other two
libraries).

After you have downloaded lyx-current.tar.gz, log in as root
and change to /usr/local. Now do:

tar xzf /
cd share/lyx
./configure

The configure program checks your local LaTeX installation
and sets up the LyX configuration accordingly. Later on, you can
view a file (from the Help/Documentation menu) that lists both the
packages installed and not installed in your system.

Of course, you do not need to put the LyX package in
/usr/local. Nevertheless, LyX can display its messages in languages
other than English. For this feature, it expects to find the
internationalization files in /usr/local/share/locale. If you
install LyX in a different place, you will have to set the
environment variable LYX_LOCALEDIR pointing to the appropriate
share/locale directory. If you chose to install LyX in /opt, then
for bash you would need:

LYX_LOCALEDIR=/opt/share/locale

and for tcsh:

setenv LYX_LOCALEDIR /opt/share/locale

If you don't need the internationalization, i.e., English-only
messages are accessible, you can skip this step.

Running LyX

Each user can have his/her own resource file in which
customizations can be made. Start by copying the file
/usr/local/lyx/system.lyxrc to $HOME/.lyxrc. Now start LyX by
typing lyx.

You will be welcomed by a window like the one shown in Figure
1. Looking at the LyX window, you will be reminded of any standard
word processor. That's the main reason I think users who have been
reluctant to use LaTeX will be encouraged by LyX to make the
transition.

At the top is a menu bar with the usual features. Beneath is
a button bar with a list box for choosing the desired style and
several command shortcuts. (By the way, this button bar can be
customized.) The window is dominated by a large text input area
with a scrollbar. Finally, at the bottom is a status line.

If you do not wish to experiment on your own but would rather
read a little introduction, choose the menu Help/Documentation. A
file selector will open, letting you choose one of the package's
documentation files. The file extension (*.lyx) shows that LyX uses
its own format. However, each document can also be saved in LaTeX
format.

Now back to the documentation. As the program is still in
version 0.12, most of the files are not too detailed, but for a
quick start I'd recommend either Main.lyx or Tutorial.lyx. In this
selector you will also find the already mentioned results of the
LaTeX configuration check (LaTeXConfig.lyx).

Let's suppose you selected the file Main.lyx. After
confirming the message that this file is read-only, it takes a
little while to load all the fonts into the X-server. At this
point, error messages may appear in your console/shell window.
Don't worry; it just means you have not installed all the X-server
fonts LyX wants to use. Then, you are presented with one of the
really nice features: a table of contents (TOC). A TOC is
well-known in LaTeX, but LyX has the ability to display it in a
completely interactive window, i.e., you can click with your mouse
on any entry and the cursor jumps to the appropriate section (see
Figure 2). If you prefer to read instructions on paper, print out
the document. Select File/Print, check that everything in the
opening dialog box is set to your needs and click on
OK (or press enter).

Now let's start to write our first LyX document. Our goal
will be a short article with a title, three sections, some
mathematics stuff, perhaps a picture, some footnotes and a
TOC.

First, if you opened Main.lyx before, close the TOC and
select File/Close. If LyX asks you about saving any changes, say
no. Now create a new document by selecting File/New. If you are not
in your home directory, change to it by pressing the Home button.
Now, type in a file name, e.g., MyFirstTest.lyx. After clicking on
OK, you are presented with a blank page.

Very well. You (and LyX) are now ready to start typing.
First, we create the title. Click on the down arrow beside
“Standard”. A list box will open in which you can choose one of
several styles. (If you know LaTeX, you will recognize most of
them.) Move down and click on “Title”. The layout on the screen
will change a bit and you can type in your title, “My First LyX
Document”, then press enter. Note that the
style changes back to “Standard”. This is a characteristic of
LyX. One style is valid within only one paragraph (ended by
enter). If you want to type in more lines, press
Newline (ctrl-enter).

To begin the first section, select the “Section” style in
the list box to type in the section name (e.g., “The First
Section”) and press enter. To add an itemize
style, type in some text (“A simple itemize style:”
enter), and select “Itemize” style—an
asterisk will appear. Now you can write some items which are
separated by enter. This is an exception to the
mentioned rule: to get back to “Standard” style, you must select
this explicitly. You can play around a little with the two font
styles, emphasize and noun, by clicking on the button with the
question mark and the person. The next section will contain some
math. After adding a new section headline, click on the formula
button and open the math panel (Math/Math Panel, MP). First, enter
a three-dimensional unity matrix: type E =,
click on the parentheses button in MP and click on
OK. Now add the matrix by clicking on the matrix
button in MP (the one with nine squares), set the size (3 by 3) and
click on OK. This fills in the nine entries. For
a unity matrix, the three rows should read 1 0 0, 0 1 0 and 0 0 1.
If you wish, you can play around a little with the numerous buttons
within the MP.

We will add a third section and insert a PostScript picture
into our document. First, select Insert/Floats/Figure Float and
type in any figure caption. After that (without clicking on
enter), click on the “Insert Figure” button
(just right of the formula button). In the dialog, select the first
item (encapsulated PostScript). If you left-click on the appearing
frame, a settings box opens. Click on “Browse” and select the
file /usr/local/lyx/clipart/platypus.eps (or change the path
according to your installation). Set the width to 3 inches and
click on OK. The platypus should now appear on
the screen. You will notice a red frame around the complete figure,
with a small grey rectangle to the left reading “fig”. If you
press the left button in this field, the whole figure will collapse
into a small, red “fig”. Left-clicking on this brings back the
whole frame. Pressing the left button anywhere within the figure
opens the “Floats” context menu, giving you a choice of actions
to perform.

By this time, your document should look like Figure 3.
Congratulations—you've just finished your first LyX document. Now
save it to disk (File/Save), if you have not already done so. If
you like, print it out (File/Print). This may take a little time.
As you know, LaTeX is still working behind the scenes, which means
that the standard LaTeX procedure of compiling and printing has to
be gone through.

If you followed the opening of the documentation file, you
have already seen LyX's feature of displaying the table of contents
(TOC) of a document in a separate window, letting you jump to each
entry by using the mouse. How is this feature set up and invoked?
In fact, you do not have to do anything special. LyX keeps track of
the “Section” style as you assign it to parts of the text. Choose
Edit/Table of Contents, and there it is. You will find all the
sections you created; if not, just press the update button.
Clicking on each entry takes your text cursor directly to the
specified point.

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